The creation of Good Data was very much influenced by Tim O’Reilly’s post “What Would Google Do?” published back in May 2007. The following idea still defines my vision for Good Data and the need for collaborative BI:
If Google or Amazon were your bank or credit card, they’d let you know which merchants had the best prices for the same products, so you’d be a smarter shopper next time. They’d let merchants know what products were popular with people who also bought related products. They’d help merchants stock the right products by zip code. They’d let you know when you were spending more on dining out than you have set in your family budget. They’d let you know when you were approaching your credit limit, with a real-time fuel gauge, not just a “Sorry, your card has been declined.”

The notion that companies will share data and analytics beyond their firewalls and this shared knowledge will help them to build better businesses might have interesting implications:

Historically companies needed to buy other companies to be able to share knowledge and management processes and this was the only way how to increase their value. But if you read a post called A Lost Decade – But Not For Everyone written by Fred Wilson, you will realize that companies that tried to be present in every market and own every possible aspect of their business landscape delivered no (or negative) return to their investors over the last ten years. Fred calls this “the end of the industrial era and the emergence of the information era”. And Jeff Jarvis explores the trend even more in his recent Guardian column:
In a sense, Google itself is built on a derivative: its data on data. Like the derivatives that got us into this mess, Google’s are based on creating abundance. But unlike those corrupted financial products, Google’s metaknowledge creates new and real value.

In Google’s economy, small is the new big. Of course, big is still big — Google itself is gargantuan. But it doesn’t grow by borrowing capital to buy companies (likely no one will for some time to come). Instead, Google created a network for an abundance of new advertisers and a platform for countless new businesses, all independent of Google. Indeed, Google does not want to own the assets — content to commerce — upon which its empire is built.

I believe that good data is the capital of the information era and in the future everybody will have to do what Google does…

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In the early days of Systinet (summer of 2000) I made the following proposition that served as a guiding principle for the company development: The web will be full of services within the next five years.

We saw the massive growth of services on the web since then. From Flickr to YouTube, from Gmail to Twitter and thousands of others. And the circle has closed a few days ago when Google announced their service platform: Google App Engine. It’s the ultimate service container as it only supports creation of web services:

* An application can only access other computers on the Internet through the provided URL fetch and email services and APIs. Other computers can only connect to the application by making HTTP (or HTTPS) requests on the standard ports.
* An application cannot write to the file system. An app can read files, but only files uploaded with the application code. The app must use the App Engine datastore for all data that persists between requests.
* Application code only runs in response to a web request, and must return response data within a few seconds. A request handler cannot spawn a sub-process or execute code after the response has been sent.

Google is often compared to Microsoft (another enemy, incidentally); but its evolution is actually closer to that of the banking industry. Just as financial institutions grew to become repositories of people’s money, and thus guardians of private information about their finances, Google is now turning into a custodian of a far wider and more intimate range of information about individuals.

It is a good article and it fully supports my belief that SaaS can be only successful if SaaS providers behave more like banks and less like software companies…

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Here at Good Data we use the premier edition of Google Apps and we get email, calendar, IM, docs and spreadsheets for $50 / user / year. The quality and availability of this software as a service is very good and after being a subject of a large company’s crappy rigid IT infrastructure this is a very refreshing experience.

The problem starts when I use Google applications that are NOT provided as part of Google Apps – such as Blogger, Reader, iGoogle or private Gmail. Since Google tries to “personalize my Google experience” it will sign me off automatically from my Good Data account and sign me into my private account with everything that comes with it: private email, files and calendar. Going back to business calendar requires signing back into the business account. Checking blogs will take me back to the private account. And so on and so on…

At one point I got so tired from this “virtual hide and seek” that I decided to use two different browsers – Safari and Firefox – to keep my two work contexts completely isolated. At the same time I hope that Google will work on the account management – it’s the only part of Google Apps that I am not happy with.